Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [330]
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Some authors, including E. J. Milner in The Lives and Times of Bonnie & Clyde (Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), have put this incident several weeks later. However, according to Simmons’s notes, Palmer clearly said it occurred “about the 1st of February,” putting it immediately after the Rembrandt robbery. Milner does not mention the Rembrandt robbery.
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O’Dare’s husband was Gene O’Dare, the man who had been arrested with Hamilton at a Michigan ice-skating rink in late 1932.
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Worley’s 1984 version differs from the story he told newspapers fifty years earlier. The day of the robbery, he told Dallas reporters he thought it was Hamilton who had returned his money, which he said was $3.00, not $27.00.
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The sole source for this discussion is the Karpis transcripts, and his chronology is clearly confused. Karpis puts the meeting in late March. In all likelihood it occurred in late February.
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Youngblood was killed in a police shoot-out in Michigan two weeks later.
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Seventy years later, the questions that swirled in the wake of Dillinger’s spectacular escape from Crown Point’s “escape-proof” jail still prompt debate among historians of American crime. Two loom largest: Did Dillinger really use a wooden gun, as he claimed? And what, if any, help did he receive from allies in and out of the jail?
As for the gun, many still refuse to believe Dillinger was able to escape using only a wooden replica. Ernest Blunk and others would later insist Dillinger had used a real pistol. Some writers, including John Toland, agree; Toland posited that Dillinger had used a wooden gun and a real gun. But FBI files make clear Dillinger, at least initially, had only the wooden gun. Agents took statements from everyone involved that morning, and several, including Warden Baker, saw it up close. Some, including Sam Cahoon, insisted Dillinger had whittled the gun himself from shelving in his cell. In fact, as the Girardin manuscript makes clear, the wooden gun was smuggled in from outside. Art O’Leary did it. After reading of a Wisconsin man who had escaped a local jail using a toy gun, O’Leary asked a Chicago gunsmith to whittle him one.
The second and far thornier question surrounds what, if any, help Dillinger received from allies in Crown Point. Ernest Blunk and Sam Cahoon were later indicted for helping Dillinger; both were acquitted after perfunctory trials. Afterward, an assistant state attorney general named Edward Barce was tasked with investigating the escape. Eight months later, in November 1934, Barce produced a secret report for Governor Paul McNutt, a copy of which survives in FBI files. On its face, the Barce report was a bombshell. In it, Barce alleged that Art O’Leary held two meetings with Warden Lew Baker, one at a barbecue stand on the outskirts of Crown Point, and handed Baker $1,800 to help Dillinger escape. Barce quoted employees of the barbecue stand and a Crown Point tavern, who claimed that Piquett boasted that Dillinger had promised him $50,000 if he could arrange his freedom. Barce even uncovered a series of letters O’Leary had supposedly written to a corrupt East Chicago politician to further the conspiracy.
It was stirring stuff, but almost certainly untrue. The Barce report had a single glaring flaw. Its sole source of information was Meyer Bogue, the slender con man who had briefly functioned as Piquett’s gofer; not long after the Crown Point escape, Bogue went to work for Barce at $15 a day. FBI agents later interviewed every person mentioned in the Barce-Bogue conspiracy, as well as the supposed eyewitnesses. All denied every salient point Barce made. None of those named were ever indicted, much less prosecuted.
If there was a conspiracy, it was a small one, perhaps a single man, the man who smuggled Dillinger the wooden gun. O’Leary or Piquett could have done it. They later told Russell Girardin that the gun had, in fact, been smuggled into the jail by Ernest